From Advice Columns to the Civil War (and Civil Rights)

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Asking for a Friend: Three Centuries of Advice on Life, Love, Money, & Other Burning Questions from a Nation Obsessed (Nation Books), by Jessica Weisberg

More than other nations, America seems to lack a dependable social compass. Perhaps that’s why advice authors have always been more prevalent here than elsewhere. In her entertaining account, Jessica Weisberg traces the roots to 17th century England and the beginning of its American fluorescence with one of the nation’s founders, Benjamin Franklin. His Poor Richard’s Almanac dispensed wisdom not only on money (“A penny saved…”) but health (“Early to bed…”) and sex (“Where there’s marriage without love, there will be love without marriage”).

Weisberg follows the evolution of professional advice dispensers into the 20thth  century, with stops for Benjamin Spock (“Dr. Spock is, save for Dr. Jekyll and Dr. Watson, the most famous doctor in all English-language literature”), Miss Manners and the queen of “life coaches,” Martha Beck. She calls out Gwyneth “GOOP” Paltrow as “a modern-day Miss Lonelyhearts, dispensing advice she’s in no place to give.” Sagely, Weisberg concludes with a bit of her own advice: “It’s not dangerous to enjoy an advice column, but it is dangerous to automatically believe whatever someone says.”

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Democracy in Exile: Hans Speier and the Rise of the Defense Intellectual (Cornell University Press), by Daniel Bessner

Hans Speier was a bitterly disappointed Marxist by the time he fled Hitler’s Germany. As a social scientist, he saw his mission as educating the masses in preparing a better world until Nazism’s popular support disillusioned him. Like many of his colleagues he came to New York and helped found the New School but was overshadowed by Hannah Arendt, Leo Strauss and Hans Morgenthau. As a result, Democracy in Exile is Speier’s first biography. Daniel Bessner, an international studies professor at the University of Washington, sees him as an important early example of a policy-making intellectual more comfortable in a think tank than a classroom, writing white papers rather than books. Democracy in Exile is a revealing look at a thinker burned by populist upheaval who worried that “man’s nature makes the realization of the good order impossible.”

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Eisenhower vs. Warren: The Battle for Civil Rights and Liberties (Liveright), by James F. Simon

Even if Brown vs. Board of Education had been his only major ruling, Chief Justice Earl Warren could be credited for moving America forward. As Yale Law School professor James F. Simon reminds us, there was little in Warren’s background to indicate a progressive train of thought: as California Attorney General he advocated rounding up Japanese Americans for the internment camps. On the other hand, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s trajectory was clearly marked: a master of organization with a flair for amicable leadership, guarding his post in the middle of the road. He regretted nominating Warren to the Supreme Court. Simon’s book adds nothing new but reminds us that men of different temperament can work together to achieve change—in their case, Warren enthusiastically and Eisenhower cautiously.

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Letters From the Boys: Wisconsin in World War I, Soldiers Write Home (Wisconsin Historical Society Press), by Carrie A. Meyer

During World War I, soldiers on the battlefield kept in touch by letters, some of them addressed to their hometown newspapers. Letters From the Boys is a social history of American involvement and attitudes toward that war compiled from letters published in Green County Wisconsin newspapers. The selections chosen by George Mason University professor Carrie Meyer tend toward high spirits in the face of mortal combat. “Have not had much time to write lately, as we have been on the move for the last few days, and it has been what I call an exciting time,” wrote one soldier. The voices heard from a century ago are articulate and many were employed as war correspondents of convenience by the press back home.

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Rethinking the Civil War Era (University Press of Kentucky), by Paul D. Escott

Paul D. Escott gets right to the point about the Civil War: “celebrations of the war’s results have been exaggerated.” The Union was preserved and legal slavery abolished, but “grievous racial problems” remained unresolved. The Wake Forest history professor puts the conflict in a global perspective. Britain’s outlawing of slavery and the slave trade inspired American abolitionists and made slave owners nervous, yet the Industrial Revolution was initially born from garment factories fed by Southern cotton harvested by American slaves. Among Escott’s startling revelations is that—contrary to popular recollection—Southern slavery was the engine of American wealth before the Civil War not Northern industry.

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The War Against the Vets: The World War I Bonus Army During the Great Depression (Potomac Books), by Jerome Tuccille

After World War II many U.S. veterans felt that no country treated its returning soldiers better than America. That consensus has long since dissolved with reports of homeless veterans, drug addiction and a Veterans Administration plagued with reported scandals. The problem of disaffected vets isn’t new. In 1932 during the Great Depression, tens of thousands of World War I vets marched on Washington demanding the bonus Congress had promised. They were called the Bonus Army and Gen. Douglas MacArthur destroyed their Occupy-like encampments with loss of life. The War Against the Vets follows the familiar story to its conclusion. The new president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, offered the veterans road-building work at Emergency Relief camps in Florida. One such flimsy tent city in Key West was swept away in a hurricane. Hundreds died.

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